Often times, for example, military vehicles are called upon to travel routes which are well known to hostile forces. As a consequence, munitions such as bombs and mines can be surreptitiously placed along such a route for detonation at a critical time when such vehicles are proximate to such hazards. Unless a trained observer was so familiar with a particular route that any change in the topography such as the placement of a bomb or mine would readily come to the attention of such a vehicle operator, it is difficult if not virtually impossible to foresee the hazard and thus avoid its consequences.
In the past, topography including roadways have been geomapped, principally by aircraft traveling above the to be mapped region from top down views. However, in light of wobbling aerial camera platforms, look angle limitations and lens distortions converting an aerial map of a region to a surface based operator view, prior geomapping techniques have proven complex. Additional complications come from the mosaicing techniques that are required to integrate frames along the route being traveled into a searchable database. Further, for a vehicle operator to identify changes between geomapped imagery, it has been determined to be cognitively most helpful to provide a split screen or some other type of parallel tracking display of a geomapped route to the route currently being navigated to enable rapid comparisons to be made between current conditions and those which act as a standard upon which future actions or detections would be based.
The hardware requires the simultaneous or near simultaneous display of the current image and the geographically referenced database image.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a ready means of providing a vehicle operator sufficient information to enable the operator to avoid a natural or manmade hazard or identify a specific changes in nearby objects or their relative positions.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide a means of providing baseline data for comparing a current route with a standard baseline view of the same route taken previously for ready, real time comparisons.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide means of alerting the driver to roadside hazards by looking forward in the database to what is over a hill or around a bend.
It is yet a further objective of the present invention to integrate information from the inspection of roadways or other roadside conditions in a format which highlights such conditions and hazards and which presents them to a vehicle operator in a timely fashion to provide the operator the opportunity to take effective remedial action.
It is a further object to provide daytime views given a GPS location and heading.
It is a further object to present to a driver a behind the vehicle view based on previous views with the vehicle perimeter represented on screen so that the current relationship of the wheels to hazards can be viewed and is approximately accurate to the current vehicle position.
It is a further object to provide a means to reduce the number of frames and size of a database by recording imagery by distance separation rather than time. This was usually done by recording all frames in a sequence done at 30 frames per second and tagging the GPS position on all thirty frames. Although the invention can be practiced with all 30 frames, the preferred embodiment is to record a frame after the camera has moved a specified distance to reduce the bandwidth and storage capacity required.
It is further object to utilize other forms of imagery or data such as ladar, radar, sonar, magnetics, multi-spectral, audio, computer renderings from depth maps or wireframes or other forms of data such as sound that can be discretely acquired by geoposition. These alternative sources of data can be mixed such as thermal with daytime video, magnetics with video, multi-spectral with rendered imagery.
It is a further object to identify a current GPS position by selecting the closest matching frame in the database with a known GPS co-ordinate that was previously acquired.
These and further objects will be readily apparent when considering the following disclosure.